Ha turned and marched out of the shallow water up the beach, almost at a run. The beach was narrow, the strip of sand spreading no more than twenty meters at its widest point before the forest began. The sand’s incline was shallow. When the tide came in high, it would almost eliminate the beach, near its edges. There was a cluster of high tide pools toward the tree line, separated a good distance from the water. Ha reached them and bent down. Her heart was beating so fast she was dizzy.

She reached a hand into the water. Yes—here. And here. And here—and this patch. It was unmistakable.

Evrim came up behind her.

“What happened? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Nothing is wrong. It’s what you asked me. Why would it be coming down the beach? Such a strange detail. But there is an answer, and it came to me just now. The octopus was coming down the beach because it was hunting on land. Or gathering something—maybe something from the high tide pools.”

“An octopus? Hunting on land?”

“They’ve been spotted on land plenty. A few species hunt on land with some regularity. Abdopus aculeatus walks from tide pool to tide pool, hunting crab. People see it strolling along the beach. But that’s not the point. The point is, look here.”

Evrim bent over the pool beside Ha. The lip of the pool was lined with mussels and barnacles. In its deeper parts anemones waved, and a few hermit crabs wobbled about in their stolen homes. The pool was shaded by higher rocks.

“What am I looking at?”

“Here.” Ha’s hand brushed the side of the tide pool, where the stone was clear of mussels or other shellfish. The rock surface there was marred by white scratches.

“Do you see them?” Ha traced the marks.

“Yes.”

“These are places mussels have been scraped off the rock. Do you see? The murder weapon the ranger was killed with was incidental. The octopus killed him with what it was carrying: the razor-sharp seashell scrapers it was using to gather its food.”

“Scrapers?”

The automonks, having finished their ceremony, were walking single file up a narrow staircase to what had once been the ranger station on the island, but was now a temple dedicated to the wandering sea turtles on their solitary, decades-long recursive loops through the sea.

In the temple, a meditation bowl thrummed.

“Yes, scrapers,” Ha said. “And I think I have a scientific name for our creature. Or at least a working title: Octopus habilis. After Homo habilis, the ‘handyman.’ We named Homo habilis that because of the tools found near his remains. You see?”